(2012-04-07) Jones Alternative Smalltalk Vision

Phil Jones envisions (Phil Jones:SmallTalkUnix) an alternate-world-history based on integrating SmallTalk with the PlainText-FileSystem-and-pipe-based UNIX EcoSystem rather than being isolated. Smalltalk could have become the graphical shell on top of Unix, providing it instantly with a sophisticated GUI (rather than wait for the X consortium to re-invent the wheel)... With Smalltalk established as the only serious GUI / Unix scripting game in town, Mac and Windows would have had to be more Smalltalk-like... And yet people would have still kept source-code in Subversion and Git. And used diff and patch (and occasionally sed) and all the other Command Line goodies... By the mid-90s, the default Web Browser would have been assembled from flexible Smalltalk components. The Web Server might have had some fast C innards, but the majority of it would be written in industrial-strength Smalltalk. Lion Kimbro's] hope for a web, not of documents but of networked GUI components would have been a plausible development in that environment. This reminds me of recent discussions about the need for more progress in development environments (IDE).